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The trial of Sabahuddin Ahmed for his work in facilitating last year's
Mumbai massacre reveals an uncomfortable truth about India. Unlike his
fellow accused, the Pakistani gunman Mohammad Amir Ajmal Qasab, Sabahuddin
is Indian and for five years he was an alleged one-man sleeper cell hiding
in plain sight. Even though he was arrested almost 10 months before the
Mumbai attack, Sabahuddin had allegedly managed to provide enough
information in terms of directions and diagrams to allow the terrorists to
launch their assault with "absolute precision."

Ahmed easily exploited the gaping holes in the fabric of India's public
safety  flaws that still exist a year after the attacks. According to
his statement to police, Ahmed paid an acquaintance Rs. 50,000 (about
$1,000) to buy admission to a college in Bangalore, and used his student ID
to allay police suspicions while he was crossing from Kashmir to Bangalore
 even as he was bringing a cache of weapons in by train. When he ran out
of money, his handlers arranged to have funds sent to him through India's
unregulated network of cash-transfer, or hawala, traders. For the equivalent
of $2, an Indian, who had bought the right to smuggle jackfruit across the
Bangladesh border, arranged for him to cross without documents to that
country's capital Dhaka, where he met with agents of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT),
the group believed to have planned the Mumbai attacks. (See TIME's video "Mumbai's Defiant Residents.")

In the year since the Mumbai attacks, the Indian government has taken
several steps to tighten security. It has improved co-ordination between the
state and central intelligence agencies, devoted more men and equipment to
security services and put intense diplomatic pressure on Pakistan to crack
down on LeT and other jihadist groups. But there has been little discussion
of how pervasive, low-level corruption can compromise national security. The
various brokers and middlemen who helped Sabahuddin never knew he was
involved with a jihadist group; he appeared to be simply another young man
living in the gray margins of Indian society, paying a little here and there
to grease the wheels of an enormous but inefficient bureaucracy and police
force. Until those margins are narrowed, security experts say, India
continues to be the world's biggest soft target. "We remain as vulnerable
today as we were on 26/11," says Ajai Sahni, Executive Director, Institute
for Conflict Management, using the shorthand for the Nov. 26, 2008, attacks.
"Corruption undermines and negates everything."

In India, corruption is taken as an unfortunate fact of life even for
otherwise law-abiding citizens. For example, ration cards are a lifeline for
India's poor, giving them access to subsidized rice, lentils and kerosene.
But to get them, you need a birth certificate or proof of residence something many Indians lack. So, they often pay clerks to issue ration cards
without a supporting document. A tea-shop worker in Mumbai told me he bought
one for Rs. 5,000 ($111). Meanwhile, the ration card is a step toward a
passport. In theory, passports are difficult to get; police officers are
supposed to visit you in person to verify your identity and address.
However, according to an entrepreneur who helps set these things up, as long
as you don't have an arrest record, the police will skip that formality for a few hundred rupees. There is no need for counterfeit documents; for a
fee, authentic ones are readily available. (See TIME's photoessay "A Jihadist's Journey.")

Given the size of the Indian bureaucracy, with 18 million public
employees serving more than a billion people, "you can never create a
foolproof system," says Ajay Behera, an assistant professor at Jamia Millia
Islamia who has written extensively about regional security. But in such a
porous system, he says, a small group of relatively uneducated people can
organize a major operation. "Almost anyone can do anything here," Behera
says. "It doesn't require that high a level of sophistication."

Making India harder for would-be terrorists to penetrate would require
reform not just of the bureaucracy but also the police. Local and
international human-rights groups have exhaustively documented the crisis in
Indian policing, criticizing the Indian police for everything from taking
bribes to engaging in torture and extrajudicial killing.
Eight
national commissions have also recommended wide-ranging police reforms, few
of which have been implemented.

Lower-level Indian police officers and border guards remain underpaid and
undertrained, while being given almost unchallenged authority over the
people they are meant to serve. A 26-year veteran of the Mumbai police told
TIME that his monthly salary is Rs. 10,360 (about $230). Less than a week
before the one-year anniversary of the Mumbai attacks, the Times of
India reported that police officers assigned to round-the-clock duty
guarding the Taj Mahal Palace and Towers Hotel had been provided with no
quarters, so they were sleeping outside, under the Gateway of India
monument.

In these circumstances, security experts say, those at the front lines of
national security are prone to accept even small bribes. By late 2006, after
the July 2006 Mumbai train blasts and an October 2006 attack in Kashmir,
security on the Indian border had become very strict. But Sabahuddin, in his
statement, says that Rs. 10,000 ($222) was enough to get past the Central
Reserve Police Force. "They asked me to give my address and I gave them a
fake address in Kolkata," he says. "To verify me, they called my friend...
[and] they got confirmed that I am an Indian and allowed me to
travel." (See TIME's video "Mumbai Voices.")

The Mumbai attackers are believed to have come by sea from Karachi, and
over the past year, the Indian government has added new vessels to tighten
up security along its long maritime border with Pakistan. But Behera
estimates that getting through a checkpoint costs only about Rs. 5,000
($111). Despite the necessary investment in new boats and training,
corruption is still a vulnerability, says Pushpita Das, who is researching
coastal security at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. "The
liability still remains."

The responsibility for cleaning up the dark corners of Indian life lies
not only with the police. Citizens, too, have to demand a better system.
Behera says that Indians use elections to throw out politicians perceived as
corrupt, but so far, "there is no great social movement against corruption."
That could change. India's 2005 Right to Information Act has emboldened some
of its citizens to question once-omniscient bureaucrats, but the progress of
reform is slow. A judgment on the Mumbai attacks may be handed down in a
matter of months; India's verdict on itself will take much longer.